Title : Neuroscientist: 'Meth is Virtually Identical to Adderall'
link : Neuroscientist: 'Meth is Virtually Identical to Adderall'
Neuroscientist: 'Meth is Virtually Identical to Adderall'
The trip meter long from the airport DC Silver Spring was unusually pleasant. It had been about an hour since he had taken a low dose of methamphetamine. It was my 40th birthday - October 30, 2006 -. And was addressing a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) sponsored meetingby Dr. Carl L. Hart
a friend, who had a prescription for the drug, had given me a couple of pills as a gift, knowing that I was an expert on amphetamines, but had never really taken any myself. I sat on train feeling alert, mentally stimulated and serene euphoria.
And when the effects had disappeared after a few hours, I thought, "That was nice," she worked, and enjoyed a productive two-day meeting.
Well, maybe not enjoyed - was a meeting NIDA after all. But I do not crave the drug or feel the need to take more. Of course, they have not participated in any unusual behavior - ". Met head," hardly the stereotypical image of
So why, then, that the general public has a view radically different from this drug?
may have something to do with "educational" public campaigns aimed at discouraging consumption of methamphetamine.
These campaigns usually show in graphically gruesome detail, some poor young person using the drug for the first time and then ends up incurring uncharacteristic acts such as prostitution, theft parent, or attack the strangers for money to buy drugs.
At the end of the ad, stamped on the screen is "Meth - not even once."
We have also seen those infamous images "meth mouth" (extreme dental caries) erroneously presented as a direct result of methamphetamine.
This type of media campaigns fail to prevent and reduce drug use; nor do they provide any real facts about the effects of methamphetamine. They only succeed in perpetuating false assumptions.
lulled by this courier, the public remains almost totally ignorant of the fact that methamphetamine produces nearly identical to those produced by the popular medication for ADHD d-amphetamine (dextroamphetamine) effects.
You probably know as Adderall :. A combination of amphetamine and d-amphetamine mixed salts
If it is. This statement requires some defense.
This does not mean that people who are currently prescribed Adderall should discontinue use for fear of the inevitable Ruinous addiction, but instead we see the methamphetamine rather as d-amphetamine see.
Remember that methamphetamine and amphetamine D are the two drugs approved by the FDA for treatment of ADHD. Furthermore, methamphetamine is approved for the treatment of obesity and d-amphetamine for the treatment of narcolepsy.
In the interest of full disclosure, once also believed that methamphetamine was much more dangerous than d-amphetamine, despite the fact that the chemical structure of the two drugs is almost identical (see graphic).
In the late 1990s, when he was a doctoral student, told me - and I totally believed - that the addition of the methyl group to methamphetamine makes it more soluble in lipids (Translation: able to enter the brain quickly) and therefore more addictive than d-amphetamine.
It was not until several years after graduate school that this belief was shattered by evidence not only of my own research, but also by the results of research conducted by other scientists.
in our study , it took 13 men who regularly used methamphetamine in the laboratory. We gave each of them a hit of methamphetamine, of d-amphetamine, or placebo on separate days in double-blind conditions.
We have repeated many times with each person over several days and several doses of each drug.
Like d-amphetamine, methamphetamine increases the energy of our subjects and improved their ability to focus and concentrate; It also reduces subjective feelings of fatigue and cognitive disorders typically caused by fatigue and / or lack of sleep.
Both drugs increased blood pressure and the speed at which the heartbeat. No doubt these are the effects that justify the continued use of d-amphetamine by military several nations, including our own.
And when they are offered the opportunity to choose either drug or different amounts of money, our subjects chose to take the d-amphetamine in a similar number of occasions, and they chose to make methamphetamine. These regular methamphetamine users could not distinguish between the two.
(It is possible that the methyl group improves lipid solubility of methamphetamine, but this effect appears to be imperceptible to human consumers.)
is also true that the effects of methamphetamine smoking are more intense than ingestion of a pill containing d-amphetamine.
But the increase in intensity is due to the route of administration, not the drug itself. Smoking d-amphetamine produces almost identical intense effects as methamphetamine smoking. The same would be true if the medicines are inhaled intranasally.
While I was home DC and traveled to New York, I reflected on how he had previously been involved in misleading the public by exaggerating the dangers of methamphetamine.
For example, in one of my earlier studies, the aim of documenting the highly addictive nature of the drug, have found that when given a choice between taking a small hit of methamphetamine (10 mg) or dollar cash, methamphetamine users chose the drug about half the time.
For me, in 2001, this suggested that the drug was addictive. But what I really saw was my own ignorance and prejudice.
Because, as I discovered in a subsequent study, if it had increased the amount of cash for as little as five dollars, users would have taken the money most of the time - even though they knew they would have wait several weeks until the end of the study before getting the cash.
This should serve as a lesson on how media distortions can influence, even scientific knowledge about the consequences of drug use.
It took me almost 20 years of scientific publications in the area of drug to recognize my own prejudices about the dozens methamphetamine.
just I hope that both time and scientific activity is required in order to understand that the Adderall that you or your loved one takes each day is essentially the same drug as methamphetamine.
And I hope that this knowledge engenders less judgment of people who use methamphetamine, and greater empathy.
Carl L. Hart is a professor (in psychiatry) at Columbia University. He is also the author of High Price: The Journey of a neuroscientist self-discovery that challenges everything you know about drugs and society . You can follow him on Twitter: @drcarlhart
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